Nvidia Needs to Appeal to Bigger Crowd

Investors remain hyperfocused on data centers despite big new efforts in gaming, self-driving cars and robotics

- Dan Gallagher

Jensen Huang pleased the crowd at the CES conference this week-just not the "right" crowd.

The Nvidia co-founder and chief executive was in rare form for the annual conference's keynote address, even swapping his typical black leather racing jacket for a glittery one. He used the occasion to introduce products such as new videogaming processors and even an artificial-intelligence supercomputer the size of a large sandwich.

He also announced new efforts in humanoid robots and self-driving cars, the latter of which he predicted will be the "first trilliondollar robotics industry." The in-person audience was thrilled-particularly with a new family of gaming graphics cards based on the company's Blackwell AI chip. But investors seemed disappointed, sending Nvidia's stock sliding more than 6% Tuesday.

That was double what the shares gained the previous day, when Nvidia seemed on track to surpass Apple and perhaps become the first public company to reach a $4 trillion market capitalization.